106: Turbonomic Actions and Policies

Optimize on-prem resources

In this section, you will take actions that will optimize your on-prem resources while assuring performance. Taking such actions will result in resources being released by entities or VMs that are not utilizing what they have over the observation period (by default 30 days) so that they can be allocated to workloads that need these resources.

1. Navigate to On-Prem tab from your actions page. Then under resize select Virtual Machines.

2. Scroll down the list and select an action to downsize virtual memory that has Efficiency as its action category. Click on its Details.

3. Check the details, you will notice that this VM's virtual memory utilization was under 1% for 95% of the time over 30 days. This means this VM has overallocated memory which it does not consume. So you can safely reduce the memory capacity while still providing optimal performance. Notice the projected results of taking the action, it will bump up the utilization from 1% to 2% which is perfectly acceptable.

Once you approve of all details and ensure this action is safe, click on Execute Action button at the bottom of the details page. Once you execute this action, Turbonomic will use API calls to adjust the virtual memory of this VM for you. So you won't need to log into your vCenter environment. If the action is executed successfully, you will see a green checkmark next to that action.

Explore existing policies

As a reminder, please ensure that you are logged in with an Administrator user. If you are not logged in as an administrator user, you will not have the necessary permissions to run through the labs

1. Navigate to Settings, then Policies. On this page, you will see a list of all existing policies.

2. From the list to the left, select Defaults. This will show a list of all system default policies.

Tip: These default policies remain effective unless the user creates a policy affecting the same resources but with different criteria. User-defined policy overrides the default policy.

3. Scroll down in the default policy list and click on Storage Defaults. Now notice that this policy sets the Resize action acceptance is set to recommend. This will result in all resize actions generated for storage being set to recommend only and being unable to execute within Turbonomic.

4. Respectively, for the action that you explored for a cloud VM where you could manually accept and execute it within Turbonomic, there is a default policy set that defines that:

Navigate to the Virtual Machine Defaults policy from the default policies list. You can see that all cloud scaling actions are set to Manual which allows them to be accepted and executed (assuming there are no prerequisites for them).

Create an Automation Policy

You will create an automation policy to define how you'd like Turbonomic to treat actions as they appear. Keep in mind, user-defined policies will override system default policies that affect the same entity.

Add response time service level objective (SLO) constraints

1. Navigate to Policies from Settings. Then click on New Automation Policy on the top right side of the window.

2. Click on Business Application. Once you do the Policy Editor window will appear.

3. In the Policy editor, give your policy a unique name like response_time_YourInitials. Then under Scope click on Select group of business applications. This will specify which group of business applications will be affected by this policy.

4. Once you click on Select group of business applications, the Select Group of Business Apps Editor window will appear.

5. Click on New Group button. The Add members to a new group editor window will appear.

6. (1) Name your group Instana Services. Change the type to (2) Static in the Type dropdown menu. (3) Select RobotShop and (4) Quote of the Day. Then (5) click on the Save Group button

7. Select the Instana Services group and click on the Select button.

8. In your policy editor, add the Enable Response Time SLO and Response Time SLO (ms) constraints and then click on Save Policy. You may recieve a message saying it may take 10 minutes for the policy to become effective, click Yes to proceed.

9. To check if your policy is created try searching for your policy's name in the list. you can make changes and edit it as necessary from here as well.

Schedule a Policy

You can set a schedule for an automation policy, which sets a window of time when the policy takes effect. In addition, a scheduled policy can include scheduled actions. When the policy is in effect, Turbonomic recommends or automatically executes those actions as they are generated. Some of those actions could be disruptive so you may want to defer their execution to a non-critical time window. In this case, you will need to set an action execution schedule within the scheduled policy.

1. Click on the automation policy, response_time_YourInitials, we just created.

2. Expand Policy Schedule and click on Attach Schedule. Then click on New Schedule

3. This section will define when your policy is in effect.

   A. Give your policy schedule a name like policy_schedule_YourInitials.

   B. Select Weekly under Recurrence.

   C. Set to repeat every week only on Saturdays and Sundays.

   D. Select today's date as the start date and None as the end date.

   E. Set 12:00 as the start time and 12 for the duration hours. Please Note if you are completing this lab afternoon local time, you may want to adjust this time from 12:00 to a few hours after your current time. The reason is that the system will not allow you to create a policy in the past.

   F. Select your time zone.

   G. Check the Summary and click on Submit.

4. Select your newly created schedule and click Set

5. Now you should be back on the Configure Business Applications Policy page. Check all the information and ensure its accuracy. Once done, click on Save Policy.